I regret aging myself by saying that my first home pc had 640kb RAM (that's all we'll ever need right? ) and 20MB hard drive. I constantly had to delete one application to make room for another as I was learning my way through them.

Hardware specs for mobile devices will mean less and less as move computing moves to the cloud. My 6 year old PC works just fine for running web apps. You can get 1 TB of memory for your laptop and it won't be any faster than my home PC for most things.

I have no idea when we'll get there, but I have no doubt we will, though I truely suspect we will see a return to dumb terminals and huge servers, if not mainframe type servers.

While we are dating ourselves, my first computer in a High School classroom was 16KB memory and a cassette tape drive, afterwards I graduated to a Commadore 64 for my personal computer, and my first work computer still had only HD 3.5 floppy drives.

-=JLK=- (1/18/2013)While we are dating ourselves, my first computer in a High School classroom was 16KB memory and a cassette tape drive, afterwards I graduated to a Commadore 64 for my personal computer, and my first work computer still had only HD 3.5 floppy drives.

You win! My IBM XT had a 5.25 floppy drive and it took 3+ boxes of of them to install my accounting software. Fun times....

I think that before we get there storage/RAM on a laptop will become a moot point. We will have virtual machines in a cloud that we will access with a tablet/phone/desktop like device from wherever we are. The virtual machines will have whatever we need or have contracted for and can grow or shrink based on our usage.

I would like to say that this will never happen, but I believe that "workstations" will only get 2 TB of RAM only when it becomes economically sensible to stop producing chips with smaller capacities (servers or scientific/math calculations are obviously a different story). We definitely can joke about the old "640k should be enough for anyone", but at some point there is no practical reason for more RAM on a "workstation" for example:

Full HD video is something like 10GB/hr - Let's say in the future we have Quad HD (2160p) 60 FPS 3D movies, that's 160 GB per hour or 320 GB per movie on average (with movies trending longer). Is there any practical purpose to be able to cache six such movies in RAM on a worstation especially considering that network pipes and local storage speeds will also be expanding over time?